Worldbuilding 2c: Continent

This post is part of a series on worldbuilding; links for the whole series can be found on this page.

The time has come to start laying out a first continent — or a large enclave surrounded by inhabitable territory, if we prefer.  For this, I'm not going to draw out maps for examples.  Personally, I don't need the practice and the reader should develop skills in adapting real world materials.

Our first problem is to sort the people into "Groups," so we can decide what topographic features separate the groups from one another.  I recognize this is usually done the other way: make the mountains, rivers and lakes, and then stuff the empty places with people.  I encourage the reader to do the reverse — if for no other reason, to give the countries a "personality."  Like this, a depiction of "The Concert of Nations," as imagined in the 19th century:

This mightn't not be to your taste; you may see it as racist or colonial or what have you.  The picture depicts that "characters" of Europe, with size indicating importance and deportment as aggressiveness.  The smaller, "subordinate" regions might depicted as children or layabouts; Britain is sulking and Russia, though with a sword, is show laying on its belly (the Crimean War ended 5 years before).   Denmark is also lying on its belly, but it's laughing.  Florence and its partners ineffectually try to stab Austria in the boot; Turin is a little larger, slashing at Austria's shin with a sword while hanging onto France's leg.  Prussia watches France and Austria go at it, seated on its ass while holding a rifle on its lap and a sword behind its back.

These little details provide a template for how a group of large entities might interact in our game world, against each other and with regards to their satellite states.  Which brings forward an important point.  Normally, when we have a fantasy world map, it looks like this:

Each kingdom in its little niche, most of them almost exactly the same size, each a little round bubble — and inexplicably, no borders.  Fantasy maps often think, for reasons I can't guess at, that "borders" are a modern phenomenon ... when in fact, every acre of every bovate was bitterly disputed throughout human history from the early Roman Empire, with laws going back 2,000 years on how to settle disputes between two neighbours who cannot agree over the location of a tree.  Just like today.

Even if the kingdoms aren't quite the same size, the differences are minor.  The Duchy, County and Principality of Ulek are each about the same size, about half the size of the Kingdom of Keoland, and that's about the total range in size of all the states in the section of Greyhawk I've given.  Now look at a map of Europe from the 14th century:

There's no logic at all, no consistency in sizes, or names of states.  It's all a profound mess, built over centuries of endless disputes and wars and power politics ... and in one form or another, this is consistent all over the world.  I'll resist the urge to post a map of pre-European native tribes in North America.  Huge powers sit right next to tiny ones, which they don't gobble up for a variety of reasons we don't need to discuss now.  Political divisions can be the size of a large town, ending practically at the town walls; or they can be hundreds of thousands of square miles.  They can be contained by geography, like Portugal; or they can spill out over their geographical boundaries in every direction, like the Byzantine Empire.

So needing to sort our peoples into Groups, we don't want neat, simple blobs here and there.  We should have an idea for different SIZES of entities, with personalities based on their size, their aggressiveness, their defiance, their religion, their dilapidation and so on.  A great big France next to a tiny but wealthy Holland, with a nearby belligerent Hannover, an impossible to defeat Switzerland, an aging yet impossibly pious Rome, an ambitious Bavaria and a benign, tollkeeper of a state like Denmark.  We have lots of templates to choose from, and we can mix and match as we like, since we're not bound by Earth's history.  We're making our own.

Let's reverse time on the Europe map above, using a simpler image:

Suppose for this example we shelve the actual history, ignoring what came before and what comes after.  Imagine the above arrangement is relatively stable, and that the "western" and "eastern" empires are in fact merely a coalition of nations based on race, politics, religion or whatever floats our boat.  White areas are untapped wildernesses occupied by non-humans, the yellow areas are neutral or client states, or perhaps outlying technological entities, and the big brown "Huns" are interlopers who have arrived in the last century and have since established themselves as an enduring empire.

Remember, this is OUR continent, so we can shift it anywhere on the planet we like ... including into the southern hemisphere, so that the top of the map is nearer the equator than the bottom.  We can plunk in deserts as we like, make the Hunnic empire a large forest and the white areas an empty steppe.  We can put a 15,000 ft. mountain range between the purple and yellow parts of "Spain" and get rid of the Alps.  We can change the flow of the rivers, fill in the Baltic, Aegean, Adriatic or Black Seas, double the size of islands — whatever we want.

What matters is that we can offer the players numerous political entities that fit into four larger Groups:  scattered tribespeople, isolated developing states, militaristic empire, benign wealthy traditionalists.  These can be shifted around, split up, separated or shoved together ... the exact shape of the cultural groups doesn't matter.  What matters is how they interact; and we can use tropes from history or our imaginations as we please.

Say that the Huns are the "developing" people.  They've arrived here from outside, encountered these relatively backward states, set themselves up as an enlightened empire and are now setting about spreading ideas like literacy, materialism and natural discovery.  Meanwhile, the purple states are militaristic but backward, resenting new ideas but helpless against the superior equipped armies of the Huns.  The yellow states are traditionalists; they practice excessive religion, possess an intensely powerful theocratic class are use their magic to manipulate the purple states.  Finally, the scattered tribespeople in white areas are rapidly learning from the Huns, embracing the new ways and forming new yellow states in Scandinavia based on magic and illusion.

The players can start anywhere on the map that touches on three Groups: white, yellow and purple; or white, purple and brown; or, if we extend the Hunnic empire in plots along the Baltic Coast, where brown, white and yellow meet.  The players can get a taste of all three, move in the direction they most prefer and as they advance through their activities, the steady movements of the four Groups against each other creates a backdrop of current events.

Naturally, these are not the only personalities we can create.  Following the suggestion of the first image in the post, individual groups, or entities within the groups, can be isolationist, primitive, culturally hateful and racist, dangerously violent, delusional about their importance, cosmopolitan, lazy, paternal ... and even "chosen."  It's up to us, really, to create a gathering that will best interest the needs of the players, who should have favourites and places they disdain.

Tiny enclaves scattered about make entities small enough for the players to meddle in the local politics ... and in the next continent over, some other set of events that can be heard like thunder at a great distance.  "Somewhere, two thousand miles away, the Ikhnat are gobbling up kingdom after kingdom."  That sort of thing.

Draw up some personalities and we move onto laying out some topography.